Technology insight
...first step in the design of end to end services is to recognise content as an integral part of a service
a split between citizen and professional users. Users, regardless of background, are there to complete a task. Whether that’s finding something out or doing something, it shouldn’t matter to them which part of an organisation is looking after the bit they’re interacting with. The first step in the design of end to end services is to recognise content as an integral part of a service. n
focus on designing content that meets user needs. ● The only way to fix search and browse is to firstly reduce our enormous stock of content, improve the quality of what’s left
and have good governance structures to stop publishing too much in future. ● Enable the design of end to end services that transcend department silos. We need to move right past an idea of
Responses from Government colleagues “On the divide between professionals and citizens, I think a one-size-fits all approach to content doesn’t always work.”
“By all means, optimise the search and browse facilities to prioritise content that is more commonly viewed. But make sure there are still routes to the more obscure stuff. The people who make the final decision about whether it’s useful are … the content consumers. Even if something only gets viewed by ten people a month, that’s still ten people who have a right to access the information they seek.” “If scarcity of use becomes a criterion for deleting material – that would be a big problem. You can’t tell what the ultimate reach of a document is… A journalist may produce a report that is seen by millions. [A webpage, relevant to benefit claimants, which no longer exists] contained information of relevance to hundreds of thousands of people. I reported the absence of the page to GDS and a redirect was belatedly put in place.”
“…pruning the site to make it more searchable is absurd, and will further degrade the quality of the service. If GOV.UK had a better search engine or … [optimisation], then this would not be necessary.”
“I can’t avoid the conclusion that in many ways, for many departments, content delivery was significantly better before the merging.”
“I personally have – directly due to the change – perhaps viewed a half of the documents I would have before, simply as there is no effective way to discover them.”
“The reason so little content is browsed is not because of complexity at all. Generally speaking it’s the lack of complexity.”
“’The division between citizens and professionals is arbitrary’… is simply untrue. There are many expert publications designed for professionals only. Here’s one [http://bit.ly/2kaEfjg which] is not written in ‘jargon’, a disparaging term, but the language that the energy industry professional use. As for simplicity, it should be no more complex than necessary, but not so simple it is simplistic or verbose. There are of course documents that are both technical and of considerable public interest. So in that case, the challenge is to cater for two audiences, not to imagine they are one audience.”
“The point is that you cannot easily find the most basic policy material on GOV.UK.”
“How did you determine that [there are too many PDFs]? Please try to imagine documents of more than ten pages, and there are many of these. Do you really want them in some other form? I want a convenient format, but above all, I want to find them in the first place.” “The three things the blog [proposes] miss the point in my view: ● The primary focus should be on different types users and a realistic segmentation of their needs, not on [Government] publishers. ● The problem is not the enormous stock of content and the solution is not to reduce it. The issue is that it is chaotically organised, and its organisation does not reflect the underlying reality. For some reason, it is difficult to search, even from Google outside the GOV. UK environment. ● I do not agree that there is no distinction between professional and citizen use, and denying this will only lead to more problems. The key for policy content is to organise the material or navigation thematically and hierarchically so that a user can start with high-level statements or overview material and navigate down the hierarchy to whatever level of obscure barely-accessed detail they need. When the GOV.UK organisation of information starts to reflect the real-world relationships between elements of information it holds then it will begin to function more intuitively.” “Calling out the current failings is definitely the first (and a brave) step. Next is quantifying them by linkage to a financial benchmark, like the cost already incurred/wasted … or the impact on readers and their impact on the publisher, for example the reduction in incoming requests for information and the cost saved.”
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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |
Issue 28 | March 2017
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